I just finished reading At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails. I probably still cannot tell you what existentialism is, although if you were to ply me with enough apricot cocktails I’m sure I would start throwing around some ill-defined definitions. But of all the philosophers mentioned in the book, I feel I would have liked Camus best: he never wavered from the belief that there could be no justification for torturing a baby, even if that act were to save countless others from dying.
I once had this book on a wish list. Would you recommend it?
ReplyDeleteI would, although be warned, I'm not a very discerning reader (except when it comes to mystery books, which I frequently stop reading partway through because they fail to capture my interest). I came at this book from a point of knowing nothing about the subject and found it an easy read, likely because it was devoid of "academic speak*" (thankfully).
Delete* For example: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."
My senior year of high school, my english teacher gushed over existentialism. We read Camus and that cockroach guy and I had the damnedest time caring. Of course I was 17.
ReplyDeleteIn high school I took an entire semester of a course called Existentialism. I quite enjoyed it, although I am not sure I really understood it. Our high school had the most interesting English courses. (The Literature of Love and Loneliness and Speed Reading were two I took. Oh, also an entire semester dedicated to Macbeth.)
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